Blurring past and present: Using false memory to better understand false hearing in young and older adults

Failes, Eric; Sommers, Mitchell S.; Jacoby, Larry L.

doi:10.3758/s13421-020-01068-8

Cited by 9 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…This suggests that careful control of participants' listening conditions and software used like in laboratory settings is not necessary to obtain reliable results. Additionally, previous studies have equated overall audibility for older and younger adults using individual speech recognition thresholds, and still found larger false hearing effects for older adults, suggesting it is not directly caused by differences in hearing acuity (Rogers et al, 2012;Sommers et al, 2015;Failes et al, 2020).…”

Section: Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In most cases, this will be beneficial to language comprehension, as it means that likely words can still be deciphered under noisy conditions. However, these predictions can also come at the cost of mishearing , where speech is misunderstood due to strong expectations ( Rogers et al, 2012 ; Sommers et al, 2015 ; Failes et al, 2020 ). Rogers et al (2012) explained this mishearing effect through general deficits in cognitive control for the older adults.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More recent studies have investigated false hearing using a more naturalistic paradigm than the priming paradigm used in previous studies. Sommers et al (2015) and Failes et al (2020) used sentences rather than word pairs, in three conditions. A neutral carrier phrase formed the baseline condition, and there were congruent (e.g., “The shepherd watched his sheep.”) and incongruent (“The shepherd watched his sheath.”) sentences.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Besides false hearing, larger effects for older adults compared to younger adults have been found for false memories ( Hay and Jacoby, 1999 ) and false seeing ( Jacoby et al, 2012 ). These processes seem to share a common mechanism, as Failes et al (2020) found that participants who showed more false hearing, also were more likely to have false memories, and Jacoby et al (2012) link false seeing to false hearing. In all cases, there seem to be top-down processes that lead to the false perceptions by overriding bottom-up signals ( Bruner, 1957 ; Balcetis and Dunning, 2010 for false seeing; Roediger and McDermott, 1995 for false memory).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The main question that the present study aims to address is the replicability of mishearings in German. Like previous studies ( Sommers et al, 2015 ; Failes et al, 2020 ), we use a paradigm of word recognition in sentences, where the context is predictive or unpredictive of the target word. We add a quiet condition without added background noise as a baseline condition, which will allow us to make sure that hearing ability between groups is comparable with respect to our materials.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Mishearing as a Side Effect of Rational Language Comprehension in Noise

Kray

Demberg

2021

Front. Psychol.

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Language comprehension in noise can sometimes lead to mishearing, due to the noise disrupting the speech signal. Some of the difficulties in dealing with the noisy signal can be alleviated by drawing on the context – indeed, top-down predictability has shown to facilitate speech comprehension in noise. Previous studies have furthermore shown that strong reliance on the top-down predictions can lead to increased rates of mishearing, especially in older adults, which are attributed to general deficits in cognitive control in older adults. We here propose that the observed mishearing may be a simple consequence of rational language processing in noise. It should not be related to failure on the side of the older comprehenders, but instead would be predicted by rational processing accounts. To test this hypothesis, we extend earlier studies by running an online listening experiment with younger and older adults, carefully controlling the target and direct competitor in our stimuli. We show that mishearing is directly related to the perceptibility of the signal. We furthermore add an analysis of wrong responses, which shows that results are at odds with the idea that participants overly strongly rely on context in this task, as most false answers are indeed close to the speech signal, and not to the semantics of the context.

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Section: Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Mishearing as a Side Effect of Rational Language Comprehension in Noise

Kray

Demberg

2021

Front. Psychol.

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Aging and memory

Dodson

2024

Reference Module in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Psychology

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Noise-Vocoded Sentence Recognition and the Use of Context in Older and Younger Adult Listeners

Moberly

Varadarajan²,

Tamati

2023

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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Purpose: When listening to speech under adverse conditions, older adults, even with “age-normal” hearing, face challenges that may lead to poorer speech recognition than their younger peers. Older listeners generally demonstrate poorer suprathreshold auditory processing along with aging-related declines in neurocognitive functioning that may impair their ability to compensate using “top-down” cognitive–linguistic functions. This study explored top-down processing in older and younger adult listeners, specifically the use of semantic context during noise-vocoded sentence recognition. Method: Eighty-four adults with age-normal hearing (45 young normal-hearing [YNH] and 39 older normal-hearing [ONH] adults) participated. Participants were tested for recognition accuracy for two sets of noise-vocoded sentence materials: one that was semantically meaningful and the other that was syntactically appropriate but semantically anomalous. Participants were also tested for hearing ability and for neurocognitive functioning to assess working memory capacity, speed of lexical access, inhibitory control, and nonverbal fluid reasoning, as well as vocabulary knowledge. Results: The ONH and YNH listeners made use of semantic context to a similar extent. Nonverbal reasoning predicted recognition of both meaningful and anomalous sentences, whereas pure-tone average contributed additionally to anomalous sentence recognition. None of the hearing, neurocognitive, or language measures significantly predicted the amount of context gain, computed as the difference score between meaningful and anomalous sentence recognition. However, exploratory cluster analyses demonstrated four listener profiles and suggested that individuals may vary in the strategies used to recognize speech under adverse listening conditions. Conclusions: Older and younger listeners made use of sentence context to similar degrees. Nonverbal reasoning was found to be a contributor to noise-vocoded sentence recognition. However, different listeners may approach the problem of recognizing meaningful speech under adverse conditions using different strategies based on their hearing, neurocognitive, and language profiles. These findings provide support for the complexity of bottom-up and top-down interactions during speech recognition under adverse listening conditions.

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Blurring past and present: Using false memory to better understand false hearing in young and older adults

Abstract: A number of recent studies have shown that older adults are more susceptible to context-based misperceptions in hearing

Cited by 9 publications

References 33 publications

Mishearing as a Side Effect of Rational Language Comprehension in Noise

Mishearing as a Side Effect of Rational Language Comprehension in Noise

Aging and memory

Noise-Vocoded Sentence Recognition and the Use of Context in Older and Younger Adult Listeners

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